How Reihan Salam Became Literary Brooklyn’s Favorite Conservative

A few weekends ago, Reihan Salam threw a Thanksgiving-themed potluck for friends. The conservative writer and newly named executive editor of the National Review has always been drawn to high-density neighborhoods, but recently he moved to a relatively quiet carriage house in Dumbo, near Vinegar Hill. Guests milled about the adjoining courtyard, which Salam describes as having a “Melrose Place kind of feel,” and inside his two-bedroom home, which is decorated in primary colors, with mismatched furniture, large prints of paperback-book covers, and a William F. Buckley poster. Salam, who often favors fitted suits but was wearing a sweater, scarf, and beanie, all various shades of gray, spent much of the party facilitating introductions. Around the courtyard he went, connecting people who didn’t know each other — writers and lawyers and anthropologists and screenwriters — in remarkably flattering prose. “He introduces you, or anyone he’s friends with, and you feel like you’re being given the Nobel Peace Prize,” says Mina Kimes, a friend of Salam’s who writes for ESPN the Magazine. “It’s kind of embarrassing. But it’s also wonderful, and he does it foreveryone.”

You could be forgiven for observing this scene and thinking you’re watching the work of a smooth operator: This sociability has helped make Salam — who is also a Slate columnist and CNN contributor — the favorite conservative of many liberals. In a professional network of strivers and cynics, it has also made him a source of endless fascination, from those who don’t trust his extreme extroversion to those who wonder, Does he really believe this stuff? He has tried to lay out ways that the GOP can better appeal to families like the one he grew up in. But he’s also called for an end to automatic birthright citizenship, defended Sarah Palin, and said he believes in repealing Obamacare, even though the party hasn’t lined up around an alternative. A conservative wonk who seems more at home in the Brooklyn literary scene than the Capitol Hill Club is a curious choice for a magazine used to setting the agenda for policy-makers on theright.

“Our line of work attracts people who are professional haters and I think that’s not a natural mode for me,” Salam says. “There’s a part of me that does like to mix it up and argue, but there’s another part that recognizes that it’s not actually the best impulse, and you learn a lot more from listening to people than talking atthem.”

“In this world of policy nerds, almost everyone is an introvert,” says Yuval Levin, founding editor of the conservative quarterly journal National Affairs. “While they’re talking to you, you get the sense that they just can’t wait to get back to their computer. That’s just not true ofReihan.”

It’s a trait Salam’s shown since his first days in the hypercompetitive world of Stuyvesant High School. “He has an unusual combination of a voracious intellectual appetite paired with a really earnest interest in other people,” says his friend, Chris Park, who’s known him since they met at summer camp as teenagers. “It’s not purely a bookish curiosity.” The child of Bangladeshi immigrants who came to the United States in 1976, he was born in Park Slope, but his mother and father — a dietician and an accountant — raised him mostly in Borough Park and Kensington. His parents had very different lived experiences from their children. “They didn’t have super-intellectual jobs and they were people who also by virtue of being immigrants didn’t have huge networks, but they’re naturally friendly.” His mother, he says, is “someone who has a lot to say. I definitely know her life was partly constrained by being a woman, by being someone who was downwardly mobile moving from one society to another, and also being in survival mode. For both of them I think a lot of it was figuring out how to navigate a new place and being responsible and meetingobligations.”

Two events in Salam’s young life marked his entry into the world of ideas. One was when he was nine, had just seen Tim Burton’s Batman (the one with Michael Keaton), and started reading a Newsweek cover story on Batmania and thought “I amexperiencing ‘Batmania!’” It got him into other magazines and newspapers they had lying around the house. The other was being tossed into the churn of Stuyvesant, where he had to learn to “be a good talker and negotiate things,” without having his handheld.

Salam found he was good at that. James Carmichael, a writer who met Salam in homeroom on the first day of high school, remembers walking the halls with him, thinking, “’Man, he’s got a lot of stuff to talk about.’ He always had this kind of simmering to feverish intensity, depending on the topic, this animation about him. In high school, that was totally the thing he was known for.” Jesse Shapiro, who was on the speech and debate team with Salam, remembers former Labor Secretary Robert Reich coming to speak at their school. Salam stood up during the question-and-answer portion and quoted his book, The Work of Nations, back to him. At the time, he considered himself a liberal: A Newsweek article from 1997 quoted Salam, champion of the school’s speech and debate team, saying that his ambition was “to be a ‘rabble-rouser’ in the cause of economicjustice.”

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But after high school, his thinking began to change. He spent a year at Cornell before transferring to Harvard, where he threw himself into theater. There, says his friend Min Lieskovsky, he developed an idiosyncratic set of interests, including social-science research, contemporary psychology, classical social theory, obscure West Coast rap, Russian and Eastern European science fiction, and the art of mix-tape making. (A similarly diverse mix now animates his entertaining Twitter feed.) He also began thinking of himself as a conservative. There was no single moment that crystallized it, but Salam became a big fan of Andrew Sullivan and later David Brooks, and agreed with a lot of what they had to say. “I thought of myself in high school as being liberal, but I was very skeptical of anything that liberals were strongly in favor of.” He found that he was more interventionist in his foreign-policy views than most liberals, and more skeptical of racial preferences in university admissions, for example. “By the end of college, my thinking had evolved. I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not a really strange liberal, maybe I’m just not a liberal,’” he says. “Being a conservative and I.D.-ing that sort of way opened up a lot of things for me,intellectually.”

In 2008, Salam wrote a book with Ross Douthat, his former roommate and now a New York Times columnist, called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. In it, they argued that the GOP hadn’t given working-class voters reasons to keep voting for it, and argued for major tax reform that would, among other things, vastly expand the tax credit for children, create subsidies and pension credits for stay-at-home mothers, and make tax rates lowest for people entering the workforce and families with youngchildren.

“I like the idea — I don’t always live up to it — but I like the idea of someone who is trying to translate for people who share my views,” he says. “I hope that it’s useful for them to have someone who is kind of trying to translate people with whom they disagree and vice versa. But that translator role, it’s almost designed to be a magnet for contempt.” Salam has his critics, although “contempt” might be too strong a word for their views on him — the main critique is that he’s far too willing to assume good faith in elected Republican officials who’ve done nothing but obstruct the president on important issues like health care. “If conservative health wonks really cared about health reform, wouldn’t they be exasperated w/ GOP electeds [sic] for never following through?” Josh Barro, a former reformist who has taken on the party more forcefully, wrote in an exchange on Twitter with Salam lastyear.

“Reihan assiduously avoids taking a firm stand on much of anything, so accuracy is inapplicable,” wrote Helen Andrews, a columnist for the religion and politics journal First Things.

If liberals sometimes doubt his sincerity, translating his pop-culture-loving, cross-ideological worldview to William F. Buckley’s wonky conservative fortnightly could test the patience of conservatives. Recent National Review encounters with lowbrow culture have involved these sorts of statements: “Millennial politics, like Millennial humor, largely consists of a hermetically sealed, self-referential universe, something like T. S. Eliot’s ‘penny world,’ in which the rules of discourse and intellectual conformity are enforced with a self-righteous ruthlessness beyond anything to be found among the relatively liberal Victorians,” as one of the magazine’s star writers, Kevin Williamson, wrote in an article about millennials paying the price for their support of Obama. When I asked Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor, what kinds of pieces he was looking for Salam to commission, he cited two recent examples: one on the climate-change movement being similar to the unilateral disarmament movement in the 1980s and another on why the United States should retaliate against China on trade. It requires a lot of rhetorical gymnastics to defend the ideas and actions of the right to the kinds of people who show up at his parties, and vice versa, and Salam sometimes seems at pains to do it. But he is ever loyal to his team — be they the Stuyvesant kids he grew up with, or the ideological allies he works withnow.

“If I had to pick one cardinal virtue, it would be his intense loyalty to people he perceives to be on his team,” says John Mangin, another longtime friend. “He is very much a team player, always looking out for his group of friends or his professional network. I’m constantly trying to get him to sell out one of his colleagues — he will not do it. You could waterboard him to try to get him to admit that a Bill Kristol tweet is stupid. He will not doit.”

The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI